1 Preface

1  Preface

2NORMAN COUSINS

3 Adventures in Ideas and Learning

4 The idea for the series in ‘‘What I Have Learned’’ came from four short lines in The Practical Cogitator, edited by Charles Curtis and Ferris Greenslet. Originally published in 1945 and reissued in 1962, the Cogitator is one of the most compact, varied, and satisfying intellectual and literary feasts to appear in this country in the post-World War II years. The four sentences came from Charles Beard in response to a query by George Counts, now eminent professor at the University of Southern Illinois School of Education, once a professor of my own when I was a student at Columbia Teachers College: ‘‘How long would it take you to tell all you have learned from your lifetime’s study of history?’’ Dr. Beard felt the great lessons of history could be summed up in just four lines:

1.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.

2.

The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.

3.

The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.

4.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

5 Each of these sentences, of course, opens out on a universe of human thought and experience. Each seems enigmatic or paradoxical; all represent a challenge to the individual mind---not just to see fully into and beyond the separate statements but to relate them to personal experience.

6 Over the years, we have found Professor Beard’s apothegms a most useful way of getting people to talk about themselves. There is a vivid recollection, for example, of a philosophical conversation with Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953. We were seated on the broad lawn in back of the prime minister’s house in New Delhi. He was at the height of his popularity as leader of India’s four hundred million newly independent people. Nehru relished reflective conversation and often complained that politics and contemplation didn’t go well together. He said he regretted being so busy doing things he didn’t have time to look into the meaning of them. Yet each man had the obligation, he supposed, to scrutinize his life and to ask whether it was teaching him anything---a paraphrase of Socrates’ famous observation that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Nehru was just as much at home with the ideas of the ancient Greeks as he was with Eastern thought. He said he wondered how many people could penetrate their own experience in order to locate the essential lessons.

7 We mentioned Professor Beard’s brief philosophical distillations. They delighted Nehru. Then we asked him how he would respond to the challenge put to Professor Beard by Professor Counts. He sat back in his lawn chair and slowly sniffed a tiny rose. Then he said: ‘‘I have often wondered whether I have learned anything at all in my life, really. It is possible the most important lessons are stored in the subconscious and that we act on them without identifying the source or even knowing they are there.

8 ‘‘One lesson I know I can identify. The teacher was Gandhiji. He taught me---he taught us all---the importance of making the means consistent with the ends. If you had worthwhile goals but pursued violent or evil means, the goals would change for the worse. Politicians are not philosophers---though I agree with Plato it would be nice if this were so. Anyway, it is somewhat out of tradition for a politician to make the means consistent with the ends. Few things are more typical of politics than the ease with which it degenerates into violence. Yet I have learned that it is worth trying to keep good ends from being diminished by poor means. Trying helps—at least a little.

9 ‘‘The second lesson I think I may have learned,’’ he continued, ‘‘is that there is no natural conflict or contradiction between free will and determinism. Life is both. Life is like a game of cards. You have no control over the hand that is dealt you. The hand corresponds to determinism. The way you play the cards corresponds to free will. So I think I have perhaps learned it is better to make the most of what you are than to exhaust yourself in lamentation because you are not someone else.’’

10 Nehru’s emphasis on the dominance of moral lessons over the practical ones was also clear in Albert Schweitzer’s reaction to Beard’s miniaturized formulations.

11 ‘‘All my life I have been asking myself not just what I have learned but what civilization has learned,’’ Schweitzer said in our last conversation at the hospital in Lambar6n£. ‘‘And I have come to feel that the greatest discoveries have to do with ethics. Man is still in search of an ethic which alone can give his life true meaning and beauty. For me, the greatest ethic is life-and-world affirmation. If we can develop true reverence for all life, we may be able to understand it. We cannot manifest it or be part of it without reverence. This, I think, is what I have most of all learned. There is also the need to understand the reality of the existence of God inside each man and to know how to make that inner kingdom manifest.’’

12 It is against this background that the ‘‘What I Have Learned’’ series was conceived and planned. Our hope had been that Nehru and Schweitzer would contribute to the series. Nehru said, characteristically, that he would only embarrass himself by revealing how little he had learned after all, but said he would try to find time to contribute. During the next year, he wrote us three long letters detailing his preoccupation with India’s problems and world issues. Schweitzer, also characteristically, sent long handwritten letters, apologizing for the quality of the penmanship (he said he had inherited his arthritic fingers) and telling of his world concerns.

13 Though neither Nehru nor Schweitzer is represented in the ‘‘What I Have Learned’’ series or the book, their place in the development of the idea must be acknowledged. Their responses, as well as the original brief quotations from Charles Beard, were highly pertinent and useful in describing the project to possible contributors and in setting the stage for the book.

14 This volume of ‘‘What I Have Learned’’ consists of twenty essays. Publication of the book, however, will not mark the end of the series in SR. The editors intend to continue publishing the essays so long as reader interest in the series is sustained. It is possible that additional volumes may be brought together. All this, however, is for the future. Meanwhile, the editors hope the book will serve as a reminder that man can still preside over his experience. The perception of a better future must not be confined to soothsayers or astrologers. The proper assessors of human hopes are those who can comprehend the connection between cause and effect and who can extract governing principles from the multiplicity of events and forces. The learning experience is still the precarious and vital one.

15 The human race may not be able to generate as much conceptual thought as it can use, but it would be disastrous not to use as much as it has. Fortunately, thought does not have to be quantified---not even in an age obsessed with numbers. Even to promote respect for thought adds to the basic energy and quality of civilization.

16 Norman Cousins